News
Chat-rooms go wireless - paedophile nightmares will haunt market
Australian WAP success may bring all the terror stories of chatrooms to the realm of phone texting, as Jumbuck signs up MMo2 and AOL for its live wireless chat services. This could be a big boost for mobile phone camera sales.
The software allows phone users to link into normal online chatroom services. It has been tested by several phone operators, not just in the UK. Sprint PCS has trialled Jumbuck in the US, and Telstra in Australia has used the service too. And it is reported to be the biggest single traffic-generator on WAP portals.
In the Far East, Digifone and StarHub are already customers, says Jumbuck.
So far, no voices of protest have been heard, but it must be just a matter of time before tabloid headlines start appearing.
Vigilantes have been calling for the virtual banning of chat room software by online portals like Yahoo and AOL, because it is perceived as a danger to children, after the abduction of kids in their early teens and pre-teens by paedophiles who posed as younger men online.
One of the biggest scare stories has been the prospect of kids being able to access these chatrooms via their phones. Not only does this raise the prospect of the children actually chatting to people while away from supervision by their families, but it also makes it theoretically possible for location-based software to reveal where they are.
In Switzerland, this is possible already. A rival service from Valis offers a date-line service. It allows mobile users - including kids - to set up meetings with people who are near them, and is able to say where the target is within 500 metres.
Valis - like Jumbuck - runs its own software but unlike Jumbuck, which runs the service on its own servers, Valis licenses the software to the mobile phone operator.
Children are seen as perticularly vulnerable to predators, because parental supervision of homework is not usually intensive, and so very young kids can start chatting to anonymous strangers while their family believes they're hard at work with chores. They are allowed to "meet" people online in a way that would never be permitted if they said they were going to a pub to meet strangers.
It's quite possible that dating services like this could lead to a boost in sales for camera-attachments for mobile phones, so that prospective partners can be scanned. Parents are likely to recommend this as a precaution before meeting strangers, once they are aware of the potential.
In February 2000, a thirty-three-year-old man made contact with a twelve-year-old girl in a teenage Internet chatroom. This first contact in a chatroom led to emails every day over a two-month period and then to regular conversations on a mobile phone. In this way the girl was groomed from this initial chatroom contact to the point where she actually met the man offline and to the point where she was sexually assaulted.
After the original contact in a chatroom, through a clever and persistent process of persuasion via email and then mobile phone, the man convinced the girl that he was in love with her. At first the girl resisted his requests for a meeting but finally she gave in to his pressure and agreed to meet him in a public place. The man arrived by car, introduced himself to his victim and drove her to his flat many miles away where he began a series of indecent assaults.
After four meetings in quick succession, the increasingly confused girl broke down and told everything to her mother. Her parents were shocked and immediately told the police. Some days passed before the man was arrested, and, pending further investigation and the result of
the laboratory analysis of his computer, he was released on bail.
Within days he had used the computer at his place of work to contact another underage girl and, using similar tactics, drove hundreds of miles across the country to commit a similar assault. The man's work colleagues discovered some disturbing emails and tipped off the police who mounted a surveillance operation and rearrested him, just as the next young victim was getting into his car.
The police arrested the man and he was charged with sexual assault and possession of child pornography – he was later found guilty and sent to prison.
- Be careful who you trust online and remember that online friends are really strangers. People online, no matter how long you have been talking to them or how friendly they are, may not be who they say they are.
- Stay in charge in chat. Keep your personal information secret when chatting online (name, address, telephone number, mobile number, private email address, picture), even if people ask for this.
- Check your profile and make sure it doesn't include any personal information (name, address, telephone number, mobile number, private email address, picture).
- Meeting someone you have only been in touch with online can be dangerous. If you feel that you ‘have to' meet, then for your own safety you must tell your parent or carer and take them with you – at least on the first visit – and meet in a public place in daytime.
- Tell your parent or carer if someone or something makes you feel uncomfortable or worried.
Yahoo shuts pedophilia-themed chat rooms
The agreement with the attorneys general of New York and Nebraska is the first to institute systemwide controls over chat rooms likely to be frequented by child predators.
Yahoo said it voluntarily suspended all user-created chat rooms on June 15 and is evaluating whether to reinstate the ability of users to create them.
Earlier that month, Yahoo removed or barred the posting of 70,000 rooms whose names suggested illegal conduct, including the promotion of sex between adults and children. The number represents 11.4 percent of the 614,000 names Yahoo reviewed.
Some rooms carried labels such as "kiddies who love sex," "girls 13 & up for much older men," "8-12 yo girls for older men" and "teen girls for older fat men." Many were located in chat categories titled "Schools and Education" and "Teen."
In an Oct. 7 letter of agreement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Yahoo General Counsel Michael Callahan acknowledged that "certain individuals, interested in engaging in sexual conduct with minors, have at times entered or even created chat rooms for such purposes. Yahoo is committed to continue to work with (the) law enforcement community, to minimize, target and take action against such behavior."
The agreement is "an affirmative step for Yahoo," Spitzer said at a news conference. The attorney general said his office will look at other Internet service providers that may have similar problems.
"Because of this agreement, Yahoo chat rooms are a safer place today," Jon Bruning, Nebraska's attorney general, said in a statement.
Yahoo agreed to prescreen user-created chat room names, to reject names encouraging sexual activity between adults and children and, on finding chat rooms encouraging such activity, to purge them within 24 hours. It also agreed to develop education materials promoting the safe use of chat rooms.
New York and Nebraska began their investigations this year after learning that children had unfettered access to adult chat rooms.
One investigator, posing as a 14-year-old girl, reported receiving 35 personal messages of a sexual nature over 25 minutes, Spitzer said. The senders of those messages appeared to be adult chat room participants, he said.
Yahoo also agreed to donate $175,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's New York affiliates and additional free online advertising to promote Internet safety.
The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal.
In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the documents indicate were intended to create "new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology." One of those projects is research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., devoted to automated monitoring and profiling of the behavior of chat-room users.
The CIA has been working behind the scenes for a number of months to help develop technology for monitoring chat on the Internet. A real-world test starts with the New Year.
• November 2002: Invitation-only workshop convened by CIA and NSF on antiterrorism research.
• April 2003: CIA and NSF sign "memorandum of understanding" to fund technology research.
• June 2004: Deadline for submitting research proposals to NSF.
• July 2004: CIA and NSF review nearly 250 research proposals.
• January 2005: Scheduled start date of chat room monitoring project at Rensselaer Polytechnic.
Even though the money ostensibly comes from the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved in selecting recipients for the research grants, according to a contract between the two agencies obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and reviewed by CNET News.com.
NSF program director Leland Jameson said Wednesday the two-year agreement probably will not be renewed for the 2005 fiscal year. "Probably we won't be working with the CIA anymore at all," Jameson said. "I think that people have moved on to other things."
The NSF grant for chat-room surveillance was reported earlier this year, but without disclosure of the CIA's role in the project. The NSF-CIA memorandum of understanding says that while the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the fight against terrorism presented U.S. spy agencies with surveillance challenges, existing spy "capabilities can be significantly enhanced with advanced technology."
EPIC director Marc Rotenberg, whose nonprofit group obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, said the CIA's clandestine involvement was worrisome. "The intelligence community is changing the priorities of scientific research in the U.S.," Rotenberg said. "You have to be careful that the National Science Foundation doesn't become the National Spy Foundation."
A CIA representative would not answer questions, saying the agency's policy is never to talk about funding. The two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers involved, Bulent Yener and Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, did not respond to interview requests.
Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."
Yener and Krishnamoorthy, both associate professors of computer science, wrote that their research would involve writing a program for "silently listening" to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and "logging all the messages." One of the oldest and most popular methods
for chatting online, IRC attracts hundreds of thousands of users every day. A history written by IRC creator Jarkko Oikarinen said the concept grew out of chat technology for modem-based bulletin boards in the 1980s.
The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin Jan. 1, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored. A June 2004 paper they published, also funded by the NSF, described a project that quietly monitored users of the popular Undernet network, which has about 144,000 users and 50,000 channels. In the paper, Yener and Krishnamoorthy predicted their work "could aid (the) intelligence community to eavesdrop in chat rooms, profile chatters and identify hidden groups of chatters in a cost-effective way" and that their future research will focus on identifying "topic-based information."
Al Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said he does not object to the CIA funding terrorism-related research in general.
"I don't know about chat-room surveillance, but doing research on issues related to terrorism is certainly legitimate," Teich said. "Whether the CIA ought to be funding research in universities in a clandestine manner is a different issue."
About Chat Rooms
Chat is live, interactive communication with other chat participant. It is organized in a particular place known as room. Chat room is a place where all the people write and read eachother's comments. Rooms are public, so whatever you write can be seen by all the people who are in that room. Chat rooms are provided by chat hosts or can be user (member) created. These chat rooms are created to entertain people. Entertainment can be obtained if all the participant understand and follow the rules. If rules and regulations are not followed, chat rooms can be harassing, abusive, harmful, and threatening place. Content of the chat rooms are not controlled by hosts. Anything the user writes, displays in the rooms. It is important that you do not give any personal information in the chat room, as it can be seen by all the people in the chat rooms. Hosts are not liable for any material that displays on the screen. Only participant can control the material ("content") displayed on the screen. There is one good feature provided by hosts called word filtering. It can catch nasty words and prevent those words from displaying on the screen, but it is optional. Some people are so smart that they break this kind of filter.
Why are people attracted to chat rooms?
In my opinion chat is very attractive activity. There are many reasons why people come in to chat rooms. One of the biggest reason I found is that they could talk about sex without knowing the other people in the chat room. I have tried to go to some rooms and I found that most of the chat rooms are very nasty. Specially at night time, chat rooms are full and most of the talking topics are sex related. Here people can get advice from other people about sex. Since it is not possible to know who the person is, people can ask very bad questions. There are some people who would make fun of it, but there are some people who would really answer and try to help other people. There are some special rooms provided for adults to talk about sex. These rooms are always full. I guess the reason is that people cannot talk about sex while they are in front of known or familiar faces. They come to these chat rooms and express their feelings and try to find out about sex.
Another big reason is that people in USA get so lonely. Most of the people can not get free time while their friends have free time. It is possible that some friends are living in same house, do not see each other until weekends. In this kind of environment, people feel so lonely and try to have some fun to get over with lonliness. Married people also take advantage of the caht rooms. They can not go to other places like teenagers and have fun with their friends because once they are married, some restrictions apply to them, so they stay home, browse the net, and chat with other people. Some people try to entertain them by watching television, but some people want to have interaction, so they come to this place and talk with other people who have same interest.
In this country, many people come from many different places. Some people come here alone or with family. They find it hard to find friends. To get over with loneliness they try to get some kind of interaction that would keep them happy. It is very hard for them to forget their family, so they get involved online. Some people are homesick, specially people who come from different countries. Some people work during daytime and have fun in the night by chatting. It is quite relaxing for them. Chat rooms are the places where there are no restrictions to share your thoughts and feelings.
sometimes people enter in the chat rooms with their personal problems and get some ideas about what to do. Some just come to help other people, others come here to comment on other people. Some enter to distract other people's conversations, they love to bother other people. I think chatting causes people to invest unrealistic amount of time, creative energy, and money.
Why do people break the rules and harass other people?
There are some rules made to monitor the chat rooms, but people still break these rules. The main reason is that people come here, can not be identified by the identity they have given. It is not possible to locate the person and know hisor her background. If the reader does not know the other person who he or she is chatting with, then he or she can say whatever he/she wishes. Chat hosts do not monitor the "content" of the chat rooms, and some people take advantage of that and try to be as nasty as possible. Some people enter as a guest and these people do not care about the people who really want to talk. The main reason why people break the rules is they have many choices to enter different chat rooms. Even if the host terminate their account due to bad behavior, they can enter as a guest or create a new account. In addition to this, there are many chat places so it is hard for chat hosts to keep track of the person who misbehaves.
Chat addiction and protection
Chatting is very good if you can control yourself. In my opinion, it is addictive. People who once enter the chat rooms have a difficult time exiting because peolpe love to talk with other people who have same interests. People love to talk about something they are interested in. Sometimes you want ot exit out from there but other people would not let you go. Of course, you could exit from chat rooms anytime, but you can not do that because you feel like you should stay there, your mind does not let you do that. To protect yourself from addiction, you should enter the room with a time limit. No matter how interesting the topic is, you should leave when the time is over. Because I found it hard to leave the room, other people have the ability to hold you in there.
Chat as an Entertainment
Just like television, chatting is another form of entertainment. People who work hard and and get some time to entertain themselves watch television or go see their friends. But not all people do that, so some people entertain themselves by surfing on the internet and chatting with other people. As other countries get connected to the internet, more and more chat rooms will be created and more people will chat with others. People would get more familiar with chat places and would chat on PC rather than calling on the phone and talk to their friends.